I always wanted to know why Jack Roush wears a straw hat without a sponsor’s logo in a sport that’s powered by the ubiquitous sponsor decals.

I finally got to ask him Wednesday, when I interviewed him at his museum in Livonia for a story about his induction into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Ironically, it was because of the sponsors that he chose to avoid representing them on his head.

“I always had this conflict between sponsors,” he said. “They’d give you hats and you’re expected to wear their hats. And if you had a picture taken with one sponsor’s hat, you sure need to have it taken with the others.”

Jack Roush, owner of a NASCAR team and other businesses in his race car museum that is open to the public at his office complex in Livonia, Michigan, on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019.
.(Photo: Eric Seals/Detroit Free Press)

Roush believes it was 1991 (the dates of the races support this) when he had a really busy weekend attending two racing series in two states in two days. He had four or five cars running in the Detroit Grand Prix Trans-Am race on Saturday, June 15. On Sunday, June 16, he had two cars in the NASCAR Winston Cup race at Pocono International Speedway in Pennsylvania.

Instead of trying to keep all his sponsor’s hats straight, Roush sent his secretary on an errand in downtown Detroit.

“I asked her to go find a men’s store and buy me a Sunday — not a gentlemen’s hat but not a desert-looking hat — but to buy me a hat that I might wear to church on Sunday,” he said. “And she brought back the straw, seagrass fedora that I’m known for.”

Late, great NASCAR television announcer Benny Parsons took it from there.

“Benny Parsons saw what I was doing with the hats,” Roush said, “and he called me the Cat in the Hat and it stuck.”

Roush, 76, said the specific hat he wears has gone out of production, but he still has about a dozen that he expects to sustain him for the rest of his racing career. Roush’s museum sells replicas, though he donned a slightly different version for our interview.

“It’s too cold in Michigan every day, so I’m wearing a felt hat for the minus-5-degree weather,” he said with a wink.

Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.